Posted: Wed 07 Mar 2012, 20:42 Post_subject:
mtPaint: How I did a better German translationSub_title: Mini-HowTo and improved translation attached

Here is an improved German Translation of mtPaint I was working on for a very long while.
Thanks to Dmitry and Mark, I like your program much.
But as native German speaker I found the translation incomplete and at times confusing for example "Unsharp Mask" was translated with "Weichzeichnen" which means the exact opposite. We have a term for this type of sharpening: 'Unschärfe maskieren'. It is widely used for example in foto magazines. Translating to get a clean user experience is much more than just replacing English strings with German ones. I had to learn and try out every function in mtPaint reading the manual in detail and than to look at every translation in it's context running the program. For certain terms I looked at other programs like Gimp or Photoshop (that I do not own so internet was my source). I even consulted some technical texts on the internet from German universities to learn if we have a term for 'Difference of Gaussians' and didn't find any. Even in German texts they use the English term. But what is it doing: finding edges. So I ended up translating the menu entry
"//Difference of Gaussians ..." by
"//Konturen finden (DoG-Filter) ..."
because it's this a user is first looking for to do. DoG-Filter is a hint at what is behind. The title of the next window I just let because one may want to know what mtPaint will do exactly. Maybe another approach is preferable. Translating is also a lot about compliance and consitency like "Load" a file in German is always "Öffnen", not "Laden". Translating teams of Gnome and KDE have word lists. And so on...

This is my attempt to bring the maximum of this to mtPaint. I took the .po-File of mtPaint 3.34.78 but that of latest 3.40 didn't change. There will certainly be an update because I always find some little thing and there are many comments in the .po-file that I may delete.
I appreciate your comments or suggestions.

In Lucid and Racy you have to decompress the archive and copy the .mo file to
/usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/
then restart mtPaint. (Be sure the locale is set to de.)

Regards

PS:
To Dmitry, Barry and others creating for example a German Puppy:
I have done this to improve my user experience of mtPaint and hopefully that of other German speaking people, too. So take it to your project if you want to.

Updated 22 March 2012, 14:19, several typos removed using Libreoffice as aid